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There is a place for fawning, submissive deference. This isn't that place. There is nothing unreasonable or disrespectful about questioning whether the administration properly considered all the implications of instituting this new program. Indeed, with a novel program like this one, it'd be shocking if they got everything right the first time.

Agreed - it would be entirely appropriate to question the administration and/or other AJD students to better understand the situation. Everyone has an interest in having an environment that is as fair as possible. However, I believe it is entirely inappropriate (and self-defeating) to make completely unsubstantiated accusations about improper OCI advantages and/or thinly veiled criticisms of your fellow students' accomplishments in a public environment such as this blog. Discretion is an important part of being an attorney. Feel free to contact me or any of the other AJD students directly.

There is a place for fawning, submissive deference. This isn't that place. There is nothing unreasonable or disrespectful about questioning whether the administration properly considered all the implications of instituting this new program. Indeed, with a novel program like this one, it'd be shocking if they got everything right the first time.

Agreed - it would be entirely appropriate to question the administration and/or other AJD students to better understand the situation. Everyone has an interest in having an environment that is as fair as possible. However, I believe it is entirely inappropriate (and self-defeating) to make completely unsubstantiated accusations about improper OCI advantages and/or thinly veiled criticisms of your fellow students' accomplishments in a public environment such as this blog. Discretion is an important part of being an attorney. Feel free to contact me or any of the other AJD students directly.

j-musey

All well and good, but this isn't about the AJD students--so why would people want to "contact" you? The only area of dissatisfaction is the administration's handling of a potentially--and I stress that word--troubling disparity in grading policies.

There is a place for fawning, submissive deference. This isn't that place. There is nothing unreasonable or disrespectful about questioning whether the administration properly considered all the implications of instituting this new program. Indeed, with a novel program like this one, it'd be shocking if they got everything right the first time.

Agreed - it would be entirely appropriate to question the administration and/or other AJD students to better understand the situation. Everyone has an interest in having an environment that is as fair as possible. However, I believe it is entirely inappropriate (and self-defeating) to make completely unsubstantiated accusations about improper OCI advantages and/or thinly veiled criticisms of your fellow students' accomplishments in a public environment such as this blog. Discretion is an important part of being an attorney. Feel free to contact me or any of the other AJD students directly.

j-musey

All well and good, but this isn't about the AJD students--so why would people want to "contact" you? The only area of dissatisfaction is the administration's handling of a potentially--and I stress that word--troubling disparity in grading policies.

lol ... difficult to believe that the AJD students aren't of topic in this thread. Perhaps the idea for contacting them is so that you can coordinate a dialogue with the administration to address these concerns.

In any case, having an internal cat-fight / gripe-session turn up tops in an employment forum probably isn't a good thing for any NU student.

But I digress. I don't see the need for great discretion in this situation.

Also, musey getting upset here is silly. You have no authority, Why would anyone contact you? In fact sans this thread if a random person had contacted you, what useful response could you have provided?

The OP was somewhat undiplomatic, but he was simply using this forum community, which has a lot of participants from NU to ask for opinions on the issue. Contacting individual AJDs would have been nonsensical, using the listserv would have been even more contentious, and bringing specific complaints to the adminstration wold be premature. An informal discussion board like TLS is the best available forum here.

Let me reiterate that I have no specific beef with the AJDs. Their concerns are very legtimate, and indeed, if the administration adopted policies that were potentially lenient in the grades department, it might have been to offset the real concern that they go into OCI with no 1L internship and only one semester of grades. Regardless, when you take the single thng that induces in 1Ls the most anxiety (the curve) and eliminate it for a subset of the class, it is certain you will have to deal with the reaction of the rest of the students.

Last edited by rayiner on Mon Sep 14, 2009 12:35 pm, edited 2 times in total.

But I digress. I don't see the need for great discretion in this situation.

Also, musey getting upset here is silly. You have no authority, Why would anyone contact you? In fact sans this thread if a random person had contacted you, what useful response could you have provided?

The OP was somewhat undiplomatic, but he was simply using this forum community, which has a lot of participants from NU to ask for opinions on the issue. Contacting individual AJDs would have been nonsensical, using the listserv would have been even more contentious, and bringing specific complaints to the adminstration wold be premature. An informal discussion board like TLS is the best available forum here.

Let me reiterate that I have no specific beef with the AJDs. Their concerns are very legtimate, and indeed, if the administration adopted policies that were potentially lenient in the grades department, it might have been to offset the real concern that they go into OCI with no 1L internship and only one semester of grades. Regardless, when you take the single thng that induces in 1Ls the most anxiety (the curve) and eliminate it for a subset of the class, it is certain you will have to deal with the reaction of the rest of the students.

This is a blog? And the Internet is a series of tubes.

But I digress. I don't see the need for great discretion in this situation.

Also, musey getting upset here is silly. You have no authority, Why would anyone contact you? In fact sans this thread if a random person had contacted you, what useful response could you have provided?

... this probably wasn't necessary. The rest of your points were fair. Can we dispense with the arrogant comments if you insist on using this forum for this dialogue?

I mean, you're talking to/about real people here. 2 have readily identified themselves. There is no need to shoot off insults under anonymity.

But I digress. I don't see the need for great discretion in this situation.

Also, musey getting upset here is silly. You have no authority, Why would anyone contact you? In fact sans this thread if a random person had contacted you, what useful response could you have provided?

The OP was somewhat undiplomatic, but he was simply using this forum community, which has a lot of participants from NU to ask for opinions on the issue. Contacting individual AJDs would have been nonsensical, using the listserv would have been even more contentious, and bringing specific complaints to the adminstration wold be premature. An informal discussion board like TLS is the best available forum here.

Let me reiterate that I have no specific beef with the AJDs. Their concerns are very legtimate, and indeed, if the administration adopted policies that were potentially lenient in the grades department, it might have been to offset the real concern that they go into OCI with no 1L internship and only one semester of grades. Regardless, when you take the single thng that induces in 1Ls the most anxiety (the curve) and eliminate it for a subset of the class, it is certain you will have to deal with the reaction of the rest of the students.

This is a blog? And the Internet is a series of tubes.

But I digress. I don't see the need for great discretion in this situation.

Also, musey getting upset here is silly. You have no authority, Why would anyone contact you? In fact sans this thread if a random person had contacted you, what useful response could you have provided?

... this probably wasn't necessary. The rest of your points were fair. Can we dispense with the arrogant comments if you insist on using this forum for this dialogue?

I mean, you're talking to/about real people here. 2 have readily identified themselves. There is no need to shoot off insults under anonymity.

The condescension in my comment was an intentional response to the condescension in Musey's original post:

If any three year JDs have questions, please feel free to contact me or other AJD's directly. Meanwhile, I think time is better spent studying and on an effective job search process...

Donning a false mantle of authority and then lecturing people on the best use of their time is far more condescending than calling someone out for doing these things, or poking fun at the misuse of a bit of internet terminology.

If you read my posts in this thread, I'm actually neutral on the issue at hand. I'm simply taking exception to someone going into an internet forum and acting like they're somewhere other than an internet forum.

Also, I'm not hiding behind any anonymity. It takes about 30 seconds to figure out my identity.

I can tell you with certainty that you read too much into Musey's comments.

As you probably know, Internet forums (or electronic communication in general) is a terrible medium to hold any sort of charged conversation for any purpose other than flaming. This is the crux of Musey's message and the reason he and some of the other AJDs believe that the conversation should be taken offline.

In any case, I think some valid points have been mentioned in this thread from everyone concerned. What now? Is there anything actionable that will arise from this or will this forum devolve/continue as space for some disgruntled 2Ls to vent their frustrations (while citing the rumor-mill).

I can tell you that some of the negative sentiments aimed at the AJDs on this forum has actually manifested in some ugly exchanges in RL and my sincere hope is that the conversations in this thread do not fuel further resentment between classes/sections.

I can tell you with certainty that you read too much into Musey's comments.

As you probably know, Internet forums (or electronic communication in general) is a terrible medium to hold any sort of charged conversation for any purpose other than flaming. This is the crux of Musey's message and the reason he and some of the other AJDs believe that the conversation should be taken offline.

In any case, I think some valid points have been mentioned in this thread from everyone concerned. What now? Is there anything actionable that will arise from this or will this forum devolve/continue as space for some disgruntled 2Ls to vent their frustrations (while citing the rumor-mill).

I can tell you that some of the negative sentiments aimed at the AJDs on this forum has actually manifested in some ugly exchanges in RL and my sincere hope is that the conversations in this thread do not fuel further resentment between classes/sections.

--Josh

I disagree with your contention that no progress can come out of exchanges on a forum like this. I for one never even knew about this issue before the OP mentioned it, and having read his post and the posts from the AJDs following it, have a much clearer understanding of it. Sure, there are going to be those whose takeaway from this thread is "the AJDs are stealing our jobs!" but you know what those irrational people would have reacted that way regardless of the forum via which they found out this information.

It is terrible that there have been ugly exchanges over this in real-life, but what on earth do you think would have happened if the OP had posted something like his original comment onto the all-students list?

I will confirm that the AJD contracts exam did have a multiple choice SECTION on our exam, but the majority of the exam was essay and short essay. However, this professor reported that he has done this with past NU contracts exams.

Also, I will confirm that we did have to write CLR memos in groups, however, I would not consider this to be in anyway an advantage. It was very painful, each assignment took much longer than it should have, many groups felt the quality of the papers suffered, and were very unhappy with their grades. Furthermore, we asked to write our assignments on our own (and were denied).

In response to: "Besides the uncurved classes, I've also heard that the AJDs had a multiple choice contracts exam and wrote memos in groups. This seemed wrong to me, I'd love to hear confirmation/denial from some AJDs."...

Since when are multiple choice exams necessarily easier? Don't bar exams have multiple choice sections? Isn't the LSAT all multiple choice? And with essay questions, at least you can get partial credit. Have you ever tried to write a good high quality group paper of substance? Its Hell. The above poster is right. It is a complete cluster fuck.

Its pretty clear that whoever wrote this comment is looking for excuses to bitch and moan. Yes, the curve issue is a legit concern (no indication of what the actual AJD GPA is, however), but lets not go over board.

You don't want a multiple choice or a T/F exam. Your classmates are smart and by definition excel at multiple choice tests; people are going to max it out. The curve gets very unpleasant in a hurry when a 90% raw is nowhere near good enough for an "A."

Of course, if it's true they weren't curved at all, the complaint is entirely legitimate.

ScaredWorkedBored wrote:You don't want a multiple choice or a T/F exam. Your classmates are smart and by definition excel at multiple choice tests; people are going to max it out. The curve gets very unpleasant in a hurry when a 90% raw is nowhere near good enough for an "A."

Of course, if it's true they weren't curved at all, the complaint is entirely legitimate.

Group projects OTOH...*shudder*

I assure the above poster that this did not happen -- according to those who reviewed their exams (most), people lost lots of points on the multiple choice section. It was, in my view, the hardest section and proportionately, where most points were lost.

But as a bigger issue, I really can't believe all of the second guessing of the AJDs on this thread. What's next - a post saying AJDs had an advantage because one of the textbooks a prof assigned them was better written than the one they used when they took the same class from a different prof a year earlier? At some point, all this nitpicking really needs to end.

I don’t want to throw a monkey’s wrench here but I really don’t think expressing your disgruntlement over your fellow law students in a public forum and having other schools watching the show is the smartest idea. Unfortunately it is so easy to speculate and make frivolous allegations without discovery. Rabbi Klein v. Goldman Sachs etc, reference omitted.

Since some of the names have been disclosed already I would like to offer some facts I know to the best of my knowledge as an insider and do a reality check here.

The AJD class took 17 credits over 6 courses during the summer, one of which is a 3-credit pass/fail course. So essentially the AJDs are getting a GPA out of 14 credits and every single grade is going to bump the GPA up and down substantially. There is at least one tough grader in the summer, namely Prof Redish, for civ pro. As far as I know, you need to score 110 out of 150 in order to secure a B+ in this course. The same raw score did translate to an A+ last year in the regular class. There is at least one person in the class who scored 109 and got a B and there are several Cs I have heard of. I think a good half the class or probably more got a score of B and under. You figure out whether that is an unfair advantage in a class of 27. And here is a quotation from Prof Redish: “in the past I gave a lot of B+s because of the mandatory curve, but they really should be C+s.” We don’t like the results but have to accept the fact that a brilliant prof simply wants to gauge his students against his level of smartness.

To show you how that would impact the GPA, let’s do some simple math. Assume the AJD has a favorable curve with a mean of 3.5 instead of 3.3 for the normal class (which I seriously doubt to be true as I have heard a good number of Bs and B-s in all courses we took during the summer). The net impact of a B score in civ pro is to drive that average down 0.11 to 3.39. If the average before civ pro is 3.4, the GPA goes down 3.31 to with a B.

Here is the calculation if you are not with me.

Average of 3.5 in 11 credits. And a B score (or 3) in a 3-credit course means a 0.5 loss from that average. 0.5*3/14=0.11 loss when averaged over all courses. Similar math for starting at 3.4.

I don’t have the exact distribution of the grades but that is a reasonable estimate and it is likely that at least half of the class (if not more) will be no more than 3.39 at best. One of the top performers, j-mussey, is actually not participating in OCI, so if you are claiming that 12 students with a GPA over 3.39 in one semester of law school are taking away a chunk of callbacks from a pool of 200+ with 2 semesters of grades JUST BECAUSE of the f**** GPA, I would seriously doubt your judgment.

Let me share my personal experiences during the OCI. There are actually several disadvantages I have observed of this AJD class, one being that we didn’t have much time to prepare cus OCI started right after our final exams literally. Another one is that some firms are definitely skeptical about this new program (of course no one explicitly said that but you can read between the lines). Firms are also skeptical about having only one semester of grades on the transcript. The skepticism is totally legitimate as the legal profession has been really conservative.

Believe it or not I actually found that having long years of work experience is a double-edged sword (I have an advanced degree and 8 years of work experience). There are some firms that are extremely impressed by it (all of which actually have big practice in the field I have worked for, 3 out of 14 interviews I had) and there are others that do not like it at all (again no one explicitly says that but you can read between the lines, at least 5 of the 14 I can tell).

Here is another observation I made during my callbacks. Apparently Yale/Harvard/Stanford are always at a better position than NU. Columbia and NYU are so not only because of ranking but also because of location. NYU students actually got about 20 interviews on average during OCI vs. 13 at NU. Considering a lot of folks are looking at NYC market which is still the largest one, the disadvantage is obvious. For the callbacks I had in NYC, the interviewees are predominantly from Harvard, Columbia and NYU but few if any from other top 14. I met about 10-20 other students on each occasion.

I really think what matters is the tough economy. I thought I would be able to launch more callbacks with my credentials but I did not, and I still don’t have an offer yet. Firms are speculating as they go through the process. They have time to entertain and you just have to face the reality. What you really need to do is to spend a lot of extra time trying to find opportunities outside of OCI.

Last but not least, NEVER BURN YOUR BRIDGES! You will find how incredibly small the professional circle is. You should never underestimate the importance of networking and the alumni are easiest to reach particularly in professional schools. The AJD class is designed to benefit the entire NU community but not the create rivals among law students.

stat wrote: The AJD class is designed to benefit the entire NU community but not the create rivals among law students.

this is a great response. I really love NU and the attitudes in this thread bum me out. AJDs are not a separate school stealing OCI slots, they are your classmates who have chosen a very difficult and experimental path.

Plus, the complaints seem to be ignoring the innovation that the two year degree hopes to accomplish. We bitch and moan about law school costing a lot ITE and the AJD solves that problem to an extent, does it not? While making law degrees more accessible to older and very qualified applicants? Here Northwestern has decided to break tradition and offer something new. I wish more law schools were willing to innovate as the job market evolves.

(all said, I'm not applying for the AJD because I think I would drown. those people are BRAVE.)

stat wrote: Plus, the complaints seem to be ignoring the innovation that the two year degree hopes to accomplish. We bitch and moan about law school costing a lot ITE and the AJD solves that problem to an extent, does it not?

Do AJDs pay the same amount of tuition as regular JDs? I would assume the answer is yes because they take the same amount of credits. If so, how could that solve the problem that law schools cost a lot? In my opinion, the solution is that schools should reduce their tuitions, not squeeze 86 credits into 2 years.

stat wrote: Plus, the complaints seem to be ignoring the innovation that the two year degree hopes to accomplish. We bitch and moan about law school costing a lot ITE and the AJD solves that problem to an extent, does it not?

Do AJDs pay the same amount of tuition as regular JDs? I would assume the answer is yes because they take the same amount of credits. If so, how could that solve the problem that law schools cost a lot? In my opinion, the solution is that schools should reduce their tuitions, not squeeze 86 credits into 2 years.

First off, why is this anonymous?

Second, yes they pay more. You could have very easily done a google search and clicked on the following link:

stat wrote: Plus, the complaints seem to be ignoring the innovation that the two year degree hopes to accomplish. We bitch and moan about law school costing a lot ITE and the AJD solves that problem to an extent, does it not?

Do AJDs pay the same amount of tuition as regular JDs? I would assume the answer is yes because they take the same amount of credits. If so, how could that solve the problem that law schools cost a lot? In my opinion, the solution is that schools should reduce their tuitions, not squeeze 86 credits into 2 years.

Also, schools still have to pay professors. Many professors will only teach 2 courses per semester. There may be some savings in "overhead," but my thought is that it would be minimal.

To clarify my previous, the AJDs do pay more per year than the JDs, but essentially the same in the long-run.